Woman's Hour - The Partition of India in 1947 and its impact on Women

Episode Date: August 12, 2022

It’s been described as one of the most seismic events of the 20th century, but how did the Partition of the former imperial domain of British India into two countries, India and Pakistan, affect women? The split led to violence, disruption and death with women facing kidnapping, rape and forced suicide. It was a time of huge destruction and disruption but it was also a time of courage, compassion and survival of the women who overcame trauma to somehow rebuild their lives. We hear from Shruti Kapila, professor of Indian History at Cambridge University and Ritu Menon, feminist publisher and writer, and author of Borders & Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition, as they discuss the stories of women at this time.Marvel, famous for its superhero comics, series and films has bought the story of Partition alive on screen in the new hit series Ms Marvel which features a Muslim female superhero for the first time. But is entertainment a good way to bring historical events to a new audience and generation? We hear from Fatima Asghar one of the writers responsible for an episode in the series dedicated to Partition. She explains how her own family story has influenced her writing. The poet and musician Amrit Kaur uses her love of music to help raise awareness of the women whose lives were affected by Partition. She started learning the Indian classical instrument at the age of 13 and since then has travelled the world using music to share the struggles of women through her music, which also includes the use of Punjabi folk songs. She performs a Punjabi poem written by Amrita Pritam.How are the events of the 1947 Partition remembered and understood by the younger generations? How does this type of trauma affect generations to come? We speak to three young women Unzela Khan, Dr Binita Kane and Amrit Kaur to talk about how the events of 1947 have shaped their lives and how it's contributed to who they are today.Presenter: Anita Rani Producer: Rabeka Nurmahomed

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Anita Rani and welcome to Woman's Hour from BBC Radio 4. Good morning. Welcome to a very special Friday's Woman's Hour. Today, we're commemorating the 75th anniversary of the partition of India, one of the most seismic events of the 20th century. In August 1947, independence was finally granted to India, ending 200 years of British rule. It was also the moment a line was drawn that partitioned the country into two, India and eastern West Pakistan that later became Bangladesh. It was the largest mass migration movement of the time.

15 million people became refugees in their own land overnight, the land they'd lived on for generations, and up to a million people lost their lives. The trauma of partition was the violence that surrounded it. But the experience of what women went through is rarely spoken about, and what better place to do that than here? So we're dedicating the whole of Woman's Hour today to hearing her story, the forgotten women of partition. Thousands of families in the UK, including my own, were directly impacted by this huge moment in not only South Asian history, but crucially British history. And yet there seems to have been a conspiracy of silence surrounding it from both the people who went through the traumatic event and wider general discussions around colonialism.

It's rarely spoken about. However, it seems that since the 70th anniversary five years ago, questions have started being asked and conversations are happening. Children and grandchildren want to know what their grandparents went through. Remember, this event is not even a lifetime ago, only 75 years. It's really important to hear in detail the experiences of women during partition this morning. So we will be talking about violence, kidnapping and suicide, which may be difficult listening for some of you. As always, we'd like to hear from you.

How has partition impacted your own life? And of course, your reactions to what you're going to hear this morning. You can get in touch in the usual way. You can text 84844. You can also contact us via social media. It's at BBC Woman's Hour. You can email us through our website. And now there's also the Woman's Hour WhatsApp.

The number to save into your contacts is 03700 100 444. You can also send us short voice notes, pictures and videos to that WhatsApp number. And when using WhatsApp, please note that data charges may apply depending on your mobile or data provider. Lots of guests will be joining me this morning, including musician Amrit Kaur, who'll be performing live. You'll also be hearing from Fatima Ashgar, one of the writers of Ms. Marvel, who've brought the story ofition to a mass global audience through entertainment. But first, to the story of Partition. What happened and why and how did it affect women? As I just said, it was a time of huge destruction and disruption. The split of India was marked by the most horrific violence, most of it done to women. But it was also a time

of courage, compassion and survival of women who had to overcome the terrible trauma to somehow rebuild their lives. To explain the story of these women, I'm joined by Shruti Kapila, Professor of Indian History at Cambridge University and Rithu Menon, a feminist publisher, writer and author of Borders and Boundaries, Women in India's Partition. Very good morning to you both. Welcome to the programme. Shruti, I'm going to come to you first. For people who will have only just heard the word partition, can you describe, give us a bit of history, describe what led up to the partition of India? Well, thank you. And it's great to be here. I think there's the immediate context of the Second World War ending and is a kind of endgame of empire that begins.

I mean, India is the first country to be decolonized after America. So it's a big change in world history. And of course, it is also known to be the so-called jewel in the crown. So there's a kind of momentum that has built up from 1945 onwards that the British are going to have to leave. But this has proceeded by almost 30 years of mass mobilization against the British. So it's not the endgame of empire that is triggered only by the war, but that it becomes unsustainable after the war because of 30 years of mass mobilization. Also, in the 1940s, for the first time in the opening years, Pakistan gains as a momentum, a mass momentum amongst political settlement of India after the British leave. And that's really when this idea of partition comes. And let me just also say to viewers, it has kind of world historical implications

because Pakistan is the first avowedly Muslim nation in the world. And secondly, it would be the same kind of settlement which would be repeated in Israel and Palestine only a year later. So it becomes a way of British, wherever the British leave, there will be partitions. And it's really India, which becomes the first big story because it is also deeply, deeply, deeply violent. It is an unprecedented form of violence that the Indian subcontinent sees. So a million people die, conservative figures, within a year, and 10 million plus move within

the same period. So that's really, in a very crass, short nutshell, the story of a very complicated history. So the buildup was, as you just said, for 30 years, the momentum towards moving towards independence was building. But then actually the division, the line of partition, what actually happened, happened really rapidly, didn't it? That's right. Explain a bit about that.

Yeah, so the endgame, the final endgame, the political settlement actually takes less than 75 days. This is part of the problem. And this is, and in some ways, this is, you know, this is how Mountbatten comes. The idea of Mountbatten is a kind of decorated hero or figure. I mean, I don't know if he's a hero, but he's certainly a figure in the Second World War. In the Southeast Asian front, he's appointed as viceroy, precisely because he seemed to be not too invested in Indian affairs, but also carries the authority of the royal family and the imprimatur of the royal family.

And the minute he comes, the idea was initially that it would take another 14, 15 months of negotiations. But it then is kind of fast-forwarded. And within, as it were, months, two to three months, it has decided, you know, initial plans, initial discussions which have taken place, say, from between 1945, 46, for various reasons, you know, are torn down. And a new partition plan is instituted in which the idea is, because if you look at the map of India, its western frontier, which is Punjab, and its eastern frontier, Bengal, had Muslim, this is what could be Muslim majority provinces. Readers, listeners should also know that having said that,

this is not a complete balkanization or ethnic cleansing that we understand Europe with, because India still date houses the second largest Muslim population in the world. So you have, you know, Pakistan, which is established as a Muslim nation, and India, which is going to be secular, which is to say it is going to be a composite culture. So that's really, I mean, it's very complicated to answer, but just these very simple facts can tell you how difficult it was. And then you have a kind of crass, blunt instrument of a line which is then made to create, as it were, Muslim-majority provinces,

because Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs lived cheek by jowl together in what is now Pakistan and India, that bit of India. And of course, Hindus and Muslims on the eastern frontier of Bengal. And so what happened? So the line was drawn, it was created, as you said, 75 days. So what then happened to the women? Well, yes. So you have, as it were, premonitions of a separation or batwara, as it's called in Hindi Punjabi. You know, there are premonitions of it leading up to, you know, in early months of January of 47 itself. And that in a way, you know, violence becomes, as it were,

highly mobilized in these districts, because people don't know if you have a district which is, you know, 51, 49 percent either way for each community, there is a kind of anxiety, which part is going to be Pakistan, which part is going to be India. And as a result, you have, you know, communities and even political parties arming themselves. And this is a civil war. The state is only present to the extent that it's entirely negligent. The British completely evacuate all responsibility for this violence.

And you have people literally ethnically beginning to turn upon their neighbors, turn upon their kin. And women are, of course, the frontier. They are the essential frontier of this boundary, because in any nationalism, violent or nonviolent, the woman's body becomes, as it were, the site of purity, of national honor. And in this case, it also becomes the site of religious honor. And therefore, there's a huge anxiety amongst religious groups to both, as it were, make the women the weapons of this war, the civil war. I mean, they're really the weapons.

And they also bear the brunt of actually making these new boundaries anew. And you have, I mean, Ritu Menon, it's a great privilege to be in conversation with her. I've never met her, but, you know, they did a phenomenal pioneering work on, as it were, excavating these experiences about 30 years ago. And it's really from their work we learned what actually happened on an everyday basis, on a very ordinary, you know, what happened to the women? Were they being told to kind of sometimes commit suicide? You know, to jump into wells is a very prominent image now that comes from it, that, you know, women were pushed into wells so that they don't move because moving was perilous.

You could be raped, you could be killed, but it was the rape that mattered. And also the kind of heightened sense of forced conversions, would they lose their religion as well? A lot, a lot for listeners to be processing. You've mentioned her, you've introduced her, so I'm going to bring her in actually, Rithu Menon, because Rithu, in 1984, you started thinking about collecting oral histories of women. So let's bring you in to join the conversation live from Delhi. Tell us why you felt the importance of doing that work 25 years ago. Thank you, Anita.

And I'm very happy to meet you, Shruti. We haven't met, but this is a wonderful opportunity. It's a wonderful facilitation of powerful and incredible women. Thank you, Anita. Amongst all of you. So, you know, when we started, actually, we weren't really looking at the violence because that's not something that had ever been part of the conversation.

It had never even struck us that this is what we would find. When we began, we began because post-Mrs. Gandhi's assassination, there was another kind of communal carnage which took place, which was against the Sikhs. And it was the widows of 1984, the Sikh widows of 1984, who alerted us to the fact by saying that this was a repeat of the partition violence. And what they said was, this is our own country. We thought we had left all that behind. And here it is again. That got us thinking about what it is that actually this violence, this level of communal, ethnic, religion-based violence means. What does it entail for women?

And so when we began, and actually I must say that, you know, we are not historians. We didn't come at this from a historian's perspective, but we are very much a part of the women's movement. And so our idea was actually to do a three-country study, that is Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, to see what the whole notion of nation and country means for women. What does religious community entail? I mean, do women have a country? Would they die for a country, for example? What did it mean to them to move to another country in 1947? What did it mean to them to leave what they knew as their home

and their settled community to go to a place that was completely alien, that was in fact another country? And then through doing this work, you unearthed this, the horror of the reality of what happened. When we began to speak to the women, and initially our idea was only to speak to destituted women, the widows, like the widows of 1984, the women who had no family, who had no community, who had no recourse other than themselves. So it was, our idea was really to look at the women without any kind of support. And what did you discover? And when we actually began to talk to them is when we came upon the women in what were called permanent liability homes, that is to say women from 1947,

who, when we began 40 years later in 1987, were still in those homes. They were the wards of the government, either because they had no family or because they chose not to be dependent on children. So it was the responsibility of the government to look after them till they died. But what spoke to them is when we began to understand

the kinds of violence that they had experienced. And it was really through the social workers who began to detail for us the several registers of that violence, culminating in the violence that was the recovery operation that was carried out by the two governments. And we'll come to that later. But what were the violence? What were those shocking testimonies that you heard with you at the time? We met a family in Rajasthan, a family in Kota. We met the nephew. And these were men who were talking because we spoke to men and women both. Of course, the way they told it was very different

from the way the women told it. Nevertheless, he told us about his uncle who had six daughters. And he said when the violence began, and actually we must remember that it began very early in 1947, in February or March, much before the lines of demarcation were made, he said that he was told by his neighbors who were Muslim and friends that they would look after them, that they didn't need to worry about their safety, that they didn't need to worry about the women. And the patriarch of the Muslim family said to this uncle of this person we were speaking to, look, why don't you give your daughters in marriage to us? We've known you since we were born, since they were born. And when they become our brides, they'll be completely safe and you won't need to go anywhere and you won't need to worry about them.

So he listened to them and he nodded and he didn't disagree and he didn't say yes and he didn't say no. But that night he decapitated 13 members of his family, including all his daughters. And then he went up to the roof of his house and he shouted to his neighbor and he said, bring your marriage parties. The brides are ready for their grooms. And he committed suicide himself. This story and similar stories were repeated to us several times, not once, not twice, tens and dozens of times. Shruti, these are stories that now are being unearthed and spoken about. Why was this happening?

Why was this particular form of violence towards women taking place? Not only the threat of violence from the other, but from within your own family? Well, I think this is one of something that goes to the heart of my research, that in some ways in India, certainly in South Asia, violence takes on a very intimate form. So typically, you know, people turn, political violence turns against one's kith, neighbours, the known. And that's something, you know something that can be discussed later. But precisely because, as I said, women are kind of perceived and actually seem to have all the kind of elements of nationalism, the repository of the nation, the family, the religion,

that they become such a potent symbol, not just for deification, but then for their destruction, then for their bodily destruction, which is why, as it were, partition is made through not simply the movement of people, but actually through what happens to women in that moment. And in a way, you could either incorporate women through conversion, like the story just told, you know, join, you know, and people, some people made those choices, you're now seeing in the oral archives and private archives, and even on WhatsApp and Facebook, you know, brothers and sisters reuniting 75 years later, across the border, one Sikh and one Muslim, you know, 75 years down the road. And this is not an

atypical story. So these are people making certain contingent kind of decisions. And then there is the violence of, as I said, of, you know, families, the patriarchs of their own family, or even religious leaders, you know, collecting women around temples and gurdwaras. And, you know, if they're moving from the Pakistan side to India, you know, to be, you know, sacrificing primarily, killing them as sacrifice for that honor. And then, of course, there is mass rape. And so you have abduction, kidnapping, mass rape, but also, you know.

And so I think it's the reason I think it's not exactly unsurprising that it takes 30 years, it only takes 1984, that it takes a second trauma to unearth an original trauma. Any psychologist will tell you that a trauma that is not, you know, suited or not looked after or not treated will repeat. And it's therefore precisely because you have a pogrom in 84 against the Sikhs in Delhi. And Delhi is the epicenter of this communal violence. A large number of refugees are pouring into Delhi

from the Western border. And this is precisely why then, you know, these stories are unearthed. Yeah. So that's actually quite important that the second, so this is why if you don't, if we don't resolve this, these things will go on.

So we have been speaking to our listeners via social media all week and asking them to get in touch with us to share their own experiences of partition. And you have been getting in touch. So I want to hear a bit of audio. One of you got in touch with the program. A minor spoke to her mother, Sagira, who was around 14 when partition happened. So here's Sagira. She takes us back to 1947 and recalls how her father

tried to prepare her and her siblings should any of her family be attacked or end up being abducted or raped. And it was quite fearful and we have to be always ready to run away from the home if they start doing the bombardment by air raid. So we were ready for everything. small things, personal, and like toothbrush, like this, some food, a small covering blanket like that. And there was that time, these were India and Pakistan treating each other like animals.

And the women were raped. Young girls, they take them or get disappeared. So when the siren goes, our father explained to us that when this situation comes, they kidnap us or rape us, he will use the revolver and he will kill us for the sake of our honour. It is really shocking to hear. And as you know, Rithu, because you were involved in My Who Do You Think You Are,

I heard these stories firsthand about what happened to women, about the mass suicides, the murders, the rapes. But it's the abductions that really stuck with me because I had no idea that this had happened until six years ago

when I made that programme. The abductions of women on all sides and then women converted and remained in the countries with their abductors. Can you tell us a bit more about that? And then what happened post partition to try and bring those women back with their own families?

You know, officially, the figure for the abductions was the official figure in the Indian records was of recovered women, not abducted, but the women recovered was 55,000 Muslim women from India and about 35,000 Hindu women from Pakistan. But of course, that is a gross underestimation. It would have been several times more. But I'm saying even these figures are in the tens of thousands, not in the hundreds, in the tens of thousands. You can imagine if you recovered 100,000 women, 55 plus 35, almost 100,000 women were recovered. At least another three or 400,000 would have been unrecovered, so to speak. But our problem was, what is the definition of an abducted woman? Because as we found when we started speaking to all these survivors, some of the

survivors, but certainly all the social workers, is that very often women were left behind as safe passage for their families. That is to say they were sacrificed not by suicide or by mass killing, but by leaving them behind as hostages so that the rest of the family could escape. And there were those who were ambushed. There were those who stayed behind voluntarily because they may have been in a relationship with a friend, a neighbour, a neighbour's son, a neighbour's brother, a neighbour's cousin, whatever. Because these were people who lived side by side in communities together. Yeah. Lived together and have lived together for generations. So there was nothing

uncommon about this. But suddenly that relationship had been criminalized that's what the recovery operation became it became an an exercise in so-called restoring women to their natural community and which was the religious community religious Would they want to go? Did they want to go back? So when we spoke to all the workers, we spoke to one who was in Lahore for five years from 1947 to 1952 in the recovery operation. And she said that there were very few women who came voluntarily. Now, that's not surprising because how would they come voluntarily? How, if they were in some remote village in the northwest frontier province, or in Sindh, or in Balochistan, or even in Punjab, how would they come all the way to the Gangaram Hospital in Lahore, where there was the center for receiving these women? How would they do that? And which family would let them go? So, of course,

we have very little information about who came voluntarily, but we do have information about the ones who refused to be recovered. How hard or easy was it to get women to talk to you? Of the women who were abducted, only one agreed to talk to us because many of them said that when they returned, their families had sort of put a kind of vow of silence around that whole experience by disguising it as having remained behind with a relative for safety or with a friend who was not willing to let them out into an unsafe environment. And so they said, when they were recovered early on in the operation, this is what families actually said to them. Just say that you were with an aunt. Just say that you were with a neighbor. Just say, do not ever admit that you had been kidnapped or abducted. There was only one woman who was willing to speak to us, but she said that she would do it on condition that her name was never used, because now her children didn't know that she had been recovered and had

actually a husband and children whom she had left behind. Goodness. This was a common story. Rittham, I have a question to ask you. I mean, because you have spent time speaking to women who lived through partition when you interviewed them in 1984. What did they tell you about the so-called mass suicides that took place? Why were women choosing to take their own lives? I don't know that they were choosing. And, you know, this is a question that we've all been grappling with for a long time.

Was there any agency in this or was this something that was incumbent on them? So one of the women whom we met, who was a Sikh, who actually in 1984 had to barricade herself in her home in Kanpur because of the violence against Sikhs in 1984. She said, look, I, when I was a young girl then, very young girl, and we were told by our families, and she said this was across the board, to carry a vial of poison around our necks. And we all carried this vial of poison so that should there be an occasion that we were left behind or ambushed or lost or kidnapped, indeed, we would end our lives. In Srinagar, we were told, in Kashmir, we were told that the hospital compounder used to hand out these poison pills. It was a very common thing. And it was, as Shruti said earlier, connected intimately and essentially to family honour. But family honour

then, of course, was immediately escalated into community honour and then national honour. Because when the recovery operation began, members of parliament in the constituent assembly repeatedly insisted that recovering the women was a matter of national honour. So once again, women were used as a pawn and no choice. And where is their choice in all of this? Rithu Menon and Shruti Kapila, I want to thank you both for joining me to talk to us this morning. Lots of people are getting in touch who are listening to the programme. 84844 is the number to text. Izzy says, such a powerful conversation happening about the history of partition. Dr Ayesha Gill says, timely scrutiny of the intersecting dimensions of gender violence

within communities during and beyond partition. But for now, Shruti Kapila and Riddhi Menon, thank you so much. Well, this year, we are talking about the partition of India. If you're just joining us, please get in touch. Tell us about your reactions to what you're hearing. And if you are gutted that you've just missed the first half an hour,

you will be able to hear the programme back in its entirety on BBC Sounds. But we're not at the end yet. Is the medium of music, drama and poetry a good way to shed light on historical events? Well, this year, Marvel, best known for its superhero comic series and films, and now for being the home of the first Muslim female superhero, Ms. Marvel, has brought the story of Partition alive on screen in a new hit TV show. The episode on Partition has been praised for bringing the story to a wider audience. One scene has caught the attention of fans in particular, the image of people rushing to get on a train before midnight.

Well, earlier in the week, I spoke to Fatima Ashgar, the writer responsible for that episode, and I started by asking her when she became involved with the project. I became involved in the project in 2019. Marvel reached out to me asking for a meeting and so I came in and we started to talk about Ms. Marvel and that began a series of conversations for me that lasted a few months before I met Bisha who is the showrunner lead writer and it just felt really natural like it just felt like our interests were very aligned. And so we were in the writer's room for a while, breaking out the story that you

know. What was that feeling like, Fatima, when you had that initial meeting, and they said that they wanted to create a new Marvel series based on a young Pakistani American girl? I mean, it was pretty incredible. So I think that the comics, I think they came out in 2014, 2015. And I remember when they came out and just being so enamored by them and loving them. And when Marvel called me in for a meeting, I didn't know what it was about. And I was like, ooh, maybe I should talk to them about how I love Miss Marvel but I was like there's no way that they would make a Miss Marvel comic right now like it or a TV show now like the comic is so young like I thought it wasn't possible and so I had kind of approached the meeting as like yeah

like I don't know what they want to talk to me about and then when they were very very clearly off the gate like we are interested in your potential involvement in the series I was like oh wow okay and at what point when you all got together with Bisha and the other writers in that writing room which by the way I wish I'd been a fly on the wall in there an experience that must have been at what point did you decide that the story of partition was going to be so central to Kamala's story? That was decided pretty early on. Even I think in the first week, Bisho kind of asked us a series of different questions. And one of the questions that she asked was like, what are things that are really important to South Asian people, South Asian diaspora? What are things that we're really

kind of reckoning in with right now? A lot of us talked about partition, we talked about historical legacy, we talked about inherited trauma, and we talked about generational healing. And so, you know, I think that that is something that is very different than what we see in the comics. You know, there's an allusion to partition, but the series in itself, it's not really about that. And so for us, we really took a big swing. And it was very clear by all with all the writers room that that was something that we all really cared about and thought was really important to put on screen. And the episode that you write episode five, I'm not going to give anything away for anybody who hasn't seen it, but it is truly

incredible. It's a really powerful episode that just switches the pace completely because we go back in time. We go to 1940s pre-partitioned India. How much research did you have to do? How much did you go in knowing about partition and how much did you have to really look into what the story was that you were going to tell? I spent a lot of time researching partition. And so for me, I've done a lot of academic historical research on partition, as well as reading stories of survivors, talking to my own family who are survivors of partition. A lot of that resulted in a book called If They Come For Us that I wrote, which is a book of poetry. And so even though it was like a poetic, creative book that had themes of partition, I just knew if I was ever going to touch

that topic I had to do a lot of research into it and so that book came out in 2018 and then I was in the room in 2019 and um there was a way where a lot of the research that I had spent years of my life doing became a cornerstone for my episode and so so a lot of research went into it. And then also the director of my episode, Charmaine Obechanoi, has been so, and has talked in interviews about all of the research that she's done in her life that was about partition. You know, and so I feel like we kind of all gravitated

towards this project and we came with a wealth of knowledge as we, you know, as we embarked on it yeah Charmaine Obey-Chinoy who you mentioned there the director academy award-winning Charmaine Obey-Chinoy what was it like working with a group of South Asian women where all of you feel directly the impact of partition it's it's in your own histories you've all done this research I mean just what was the sort of of magnitude of the feeling when you're creating this new Marvel story telling your history through this South Asian character? Were there moments where you just looked at each other and thought, this is happening in our lives?

Yeah. I mean, it was really incredible. And I think that like, there is a way like there's such love and care and craft in the whole story in the whole series, but particularly that episode. And I think we really led with love. It was very important for me for Bisha to really lead that story with love. And I think that that really couldn't have happened without us being South Asian women and femmes. Like, I think that there was a way where that kind of our particular positioning of society, our particular socialization, our particular relationship to our families, to healing, to what this looks like is the only reason we were able to make that show possible. And so, you know, when folks talk about representation, like, and they're like, well, these stories need to be authored by the people who, you know, are in the lineages of them. I think this is an example of why is like you get storytelling that is that is so dripping with care and love. And it's because

it's not theoretical to us. This is a thing that's in all of our bodies as South Asian people, as well as a whole host of other things that are in our bodies that, you know, are begging for our attention and begging for our care and begging for our love and our healing. And, you know, even when the show was coming out, we were seeing the reactions on Twitter, we were seeing the reactions on Twitter. We were seeing the reactions online. We were getting phone calls from people. There were so many moments where like, you know, me and Bishop would call each other up or text each other and just be like, this is wild.

Give me some examples. What were people saying? A lot of people, particularly young people who had never asked their families about partition, who then were like, this show has made me go to my grandparents and ask them, what is our family story? And now I'm getting the family story. And now I'm getting a kind of conversation that I didn't even know existed.

You know, we've had a lot of people who've said, like, again, like, I've never thought that this was possible. I never thought I would see representation like this, you know, because it's not just like, oh, a Muslim Pakistani superhero, which is amazing in itself. It's we go deep, we say, what does it mean to be us? What does it mean to have this body? What does it mean to carry these stories? How important was it for you to tell the story through the maternal line?

I think for us, it was really important to center women, it was really important to center the maternal line and to say, what is this, what is the healing that can happen amongst women? You know, and like, there's so many stories of partition. And so often the ones that are prioritized are ones that are happened to and are told by men. And yet so often women's bodies are the site of such deep, horrific trauma. You know, when we think about women and specifically when we talk about partition, we're talking about really high numbers of rape.

We're talking about really high numbers of people who were stolen from their families, women who were stolen from their families. We're talking about high numbers of honor killings. Just a really high and very specific gendered violence. And I know our show doesn't touch into the specificity of those kinds of violences. But what we really wanted to do was say, this is a story of mothers and daughters. This is a story, this entire series is a story of this. And it's the story of how much mothers and daughters need each other and the disconnect that happens when there's trauma and when they're silencing

and when people can't see each other for who they are. And so there's all of this stuff that's buried. Did you feel a sense of responsibility when you were writing the episode? Absolutely. We felt so much responsibility in general. Like it was the first real Muslim family show that I've seen in the West.

It's the first real South Asian family show that I've seen. It's, it's, and it's on Marvel. It's on a platform that's, that's very global. That's very big. We felt incredible responsibility to all of the communities that we come from for telling this. We felt an incredible responsibility, I think, specifically in crafting the partition episode. And for me, as the writer on that, incredible responsibility to not only our people who are living, but the survivors of partition and the people who didn't survive.

You know, I think that when you write historical content like this, you're really, there is a way where you're not only dealing with the living but you're dealing with the dead and you're dealing with your there's a heightened level of responsibility and even for us like we knew we would have young viewers we knew we would have very young viewers watching the show we knew we would have very old viewers watching this show and we needed to create something that could get that line of everyone you know that could get that line of everyone, you know, that could get, that was responsible to our youth and our, you know, the young people who just want to see a Muslim teenage superhero, and who was responsible to people who are like, are like 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, you know, my mom was born in Kashmir, as well as all of my aunts and uncles, she's the youngest. So they were all born in Kashmir. And then they,

during partition came to Pakistan. And so for me, you know, partition is not theoretical. It's literally one generation removed from me. I know my family's a little bit older. But I think that and that's kind of maybe uncommon, but that it's right there for me. It's right there. It's not something, and it was, it's some of the initial things that my mom and her, like her youngest siblings experienced, you know, her eldest siblings being 16 at the time, 17 at the time, you know, and her parents, her parents. And so I think that, that, and, you know, right now Kashmir is uh occupied territory between India and Pakistan it's incredibly it's there's incredibly militarized all of this stuff is still so at play and I think that's the thing when we talk about history is history is not static it's not fixed so what's

the impact been on you working on it has it changed you in any way has it made you feel different it's so humbling to to hear people talk about how it's moved them. And I think to just remember how much, like, you know, how much we have an impact, how we're so able, what we're able to do when we break silence, what we're able to do when we start to tell these stories, what we're able to do when we really commit to saying this is important to me, this is something I really want to see in the world. And I think that like just even seeing that on the scale that I've seen it on, you know, again, like I said, like I grew up not even seeing our history told in textbooks. To go from that and the thing of learning about my family, hearing my family's stories, so much tragedy, as you're saying, so much work to just from that and the thing of learning about my family, hearing my family's stories,

so much tragedy, as you're saying, so much work to just uncover that history for yourself. The nights that you spent alone up at night, researching the nights that you spend talking to people, the nights that you spend crying on the floor when you realize what happened to your family, what happened to other families, what happened to people that look like you that you know maybe are not the same religion as you but you could have been you know in in some type of community with like when you really mourn some of that and then to go from that to seeing something as big as this on screen it's incredibly humbling and it is incredibly humbling to watch that was fatima ashgar one of the writers of the miss marvel series which is available to watch on Disney+.

Now I want to introduce my next guest, Amrit Gore, a musician who's used her love of music to help raise awareness around the world of what women went through during partition. She's here in the studio. Why do we feel it, Amrit? Why do we feel it in our bones? Why is it that every time you sing sing that I can't stop crying honestly I think it's a range of things I think we we talk a lot about generational trauma and we talk about these cycles of and generations of pain and suffering and everything that we've heard but the same time I feel like when I sing that and when I relate to that and when I composed it I what I drew on were the generational cycles of strength and resilience and grit and everything that's been passed down to us and I think what I like to draw attention to is yes we our generation is doing so much to break these cycles that don't nurture us, but there are so many cycles within us that can be nurtured, and that's my superpower.

I'm going to bring in two other women whose partition has directly impacted them, Anzela Khan, who's Race and Diversity Editor for MyLondon, and Dr Benita Kane, who's co-founder of South Asian Heritage Month, of which I'm a patron. So, Anzela, how has third generation, your grandmother lived through partition, how has it impacted you? Yeah, I just feel like it's been really cathartic to firstly have this whole conversation with everyone and to listen in on other women's experiences.

In terms of me being affected, I feel like when we were talking about Miss Marvel as well generations like myself and generations after me are taking a lot more interest in what their grandparents went through and I feel like it's just something that we now know that we need to find out more we need to know our family's history and carry on their legacies and what they went through. Did you know about it? Was this a conversation? Because here's the thing, these conversations haven't happened. It's not like we've been brought up knowing the history of partition. It's only recently that people are starting to have these conversations. What happened in your family? So in terms of just knowing about partition,

obviously every South Asian family, most South Asian families have a story to tell about partition. But you kind of take it for granted. And I feel like you don't really care and you don't really have interest because in school, when you're born and brought up here, you're distracted by other things and other issues because there's no kind of prominence or no importance placed on 1947 partition even though as you said it is part of British history but as I grew older because I was born and brought up in a really white dominated area and then I went to university in East London and I kind of met a lot more South Asian people and got involved in I guess stories and plays so I did Tales of 1947 and from that I guess it stemmed my interest and I was like well I need to know my own family's partition story because it deserves to be told and heard.

I'm going to bring in Dr Benita Kane because Benita we saw you understand and learn what happened to your family on my family partition and me India 1947 I think which is back on BBC iPlayer if anybody wants to watch it. So how did that change you? What did you discover? Hi, Anita. Yes, taking part in that programme was incredible and it changed my life just very briefly. I was taken back to what is now Bangladesh and was able to trace my family's journey through that. My grandmother, one of ten, which I can't believe having been back to the village that she gave birth to ten children in that place, had to pack up everything in the middle of the night

with her five young children and escape and leave everything behind and then lost her husband, my granddad, in absolute terrible circumstances, lived in abject poverty. And what she went through and what she eved in, in bringing the children up and surviving was absolutely incredible. And I think as a daughter of a man who went through that, and I met my grandmother obviously several times before she died, I don't think I had any idea about any of it until I undertook that journey.

And now I really wish I could go back and speak to her about what she went through. And that trauma, and we've talked a lot about intergenerational trauma, and I'm a doctor, and I think there's so much intersectionality between mental health, the trauma of partition, so many different things in communities. But for me, it's been completely life-changing and it's led me to campaign for change, both in the school curriculum, but as you've mentioned through our work,

Anita, in South Asian Heritage Month and creating that to create that space to have these conversations. So important, isn't it, Amrit? And it's the work that you've done. In fact, your life has directly impacted that you went off and studied partition for your degree. And now you travel to talk completely Spanish-speaking audience that didn't understand Punjabi or English. And they came up to me afterwards and said,

you remind us of the flamenco women. And so those listening to the programme today are probably the first time they're hearing about this women's history. But I'm so aware that there is so much history that we still don't know about, about women's experiences. But that universal sense of wanting to belong just runs through it i bet there will be lots of people listening to this and there are lots of you getting in touch to tell me what you're thinking in fact somebody said lindsey said the hairs on my neck are

standing up listening to the musician even though i can't understand the words it's astonishing so beautiful but lots of people i'm sure will be thinking about the trauma within their own families or migration within their own families because these stories are universal um benita you've got uh daughters tell me what do what do your children know about the family history you your mind was opened your your eyes were open to what happened to your dad and the family but what about your daughters it's important for for me that they are connected with that story they are the next generation and my you And my dad is one of the few surviving people now. That generation won't be here for much longer. And we have to preserve that.

We have to teach children why they are here in this country. And as part of the work we're doing, we have the Partition Education Group. And we have created resources for schools that are on the south asian heritage month website and and i think our kids we are at risk of losing that history and it's it's so important for us to understand what modern britain looks like and salia nodding yeah no i completely agree because a lot of that generation won't be here to tell these stories so it's up to us to kind of

pass it on and for my own nano story um like you said although these are universal experiences every story is so different because for my nana she kind of um after partition her her father was actually very anti-Baghestan anti-partition and she ended up getting married to someone in Baghdad and feeling really rejected and neglected by her own siblings who married her off and I feel like that is so common yes and what I find is and we carry it in us all of us um and that that we are the generation now their daughters and their granddaughters who have a voice and we're using it to tell their stories and to honor their women so I want to thank all my guests for joining me for this very special programme commemorating the 75th anniversary of partition,

but hearing crucially the story of women, Ruth Dumenen, Shruti Kapila, Amrit Gaur, Ansela and Benita Kane and Fatima Ashkar. Thank you so much and thanks to you and all of you who got in touch with your messages. I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to read them all out, but thank you and enjoy the rest of your weekend. That's all for today's Woman's Hour. Join us again next time. Hi, I'm Andy Oliver, and I'd like to tell you all about

my Radio 4 series, One Dish. It's all about why you love that one dish, the one that you could eat over and over again without ever getting tired of it each week a very special guest will bring their favorite food to my table and we'll be unpacking the history of it and food psychologist kimberly wilson is on hand to talk us through the science bit what food reminds you of your child what's your favorite place to go for dinner what do you have for sunday lunch what's your favourite dessert? Do you say plan 10 or plan 10? What food would you take with you to a desert island? What's your favourite type of

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